


Small Rescue

by dotfic



Category: Hawkeye (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 23:26:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4240689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dotfic/pseuds/dotfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint's not going to take the kittens home with him. He's not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Rescue

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to geckoholic for the beta read and hand-holding. This is all her fault, including the fact that I started reading the Fractionverse comics in the first place.

Clint's still limping from that random-ass, weird clash with two Hydra agents when he finds the box. His leg and ankle only hurt a little--no really, barely even at all, he's good, just pulled some soft tissues. Maybe it's that he's not quite as young as he used to be and landed a little bit wrong. Nat can raise all the eyebrows she wants and purse her lips, and Kate can roll her eyes heavenward until she gives herself a headache, but it isn't as bad as it seems. 

It's late, the light from small stores and bars spilling onto the sidewalk. He finishes checking up on a mom and pop business recently offered "protection" by the kind of people who offer it with baseball bats, and is heading home when he hears a squeaking noise that doesn't fit with the rest of the street rhythms. He's kind of surprised he can hear it above the traffic noise, even with the high-end piece of Stark technology in his ear. 

The air smells of barbecue from a place nearby that has its front door propped open and his stomach growls but just when he's thinking of going in to get a snack, he hears the noise again. Several noises, high-pitched, almost like children crying. The hair on the back of his neck and his arms goes up.

There's something out of place in a scruffy patch of tall grass between broken blocks of pavement. A cardboard box sits there, jostling slightly side to side on its own.

"Huh."

He nudges it carefully with the toe of his sneaker. Several more tiny high-pitched cries emerge from the box.

Wind's picking up as Clint kneels, grass and bits of concrete under his knee. Another waft of chicken reaches him and his stomach growls again, louder, but he's going to have to wait to eat, godammit, because when he opens the box, eight eyes glow up at him. His stomach goes kind of tight all of a sudden. What kind of person just leaves a box of kittens, who does that? 

Assholes.

He's not going to bring them back to his apartment building. Nope. He's not. There's got to be a animal shelter open somewhere.

Not bringing them home with him. He’s just not.

* * *

So he maybe brings them home with him. Carries the kittens in the cardboard box back to his building, then up the stairs.

Lucky's waiting and alert when Clint opens the door with his elbow. The dog backs up a few steps, lowers his head, growls, barks once, then sits and tilts his head to the side.

Might as well find out how cat-friendly Lucky is before settling in for the night. Clint carefully lowers the box to the floor, and grabs the dog's collar. Lucky licks Clint's arm, then noses a flap of the box open. He barks again, but doesn't growl.

"Cats are our friends, not food," Clint says.

After staring for a few seconds, Lucky carefully sniffs and lowers his head into the box, then starts licking the dirtiest kitten, a black and white whose white areas have smudged almost to gray with dust and soot.

Okay, then.

Turns out he actually has some milk left in the fridge. He pours some into a small bowl and puts it in the box. The kittens gather around it eagerly, mewing. Along with the black and white kitten, there's two gray-striped ones, and a black one smaller than the rest with a white nose and two white paws.

His leg is bothering him, only a little. Stretching to ease the twinges, Clint yawns, then puts a frozen pizza in the microwave. It's not barbecued chicken, but it's food.

Lucky lies down next to the box like he's going to stay there all night.

Munching on his pizza, Clint watches the kittens curl up together in a tangle of paws and ears and tails. The box seems too sparse, cold. He finds an old shirt with the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on it crumpled on the floor of his closet, shakes it out, and tucks it in around the kittens.

He finishes his pizza lying on the couch watching some old movie from the technicolor era on TV. Clint doesn't remember when he falls asleep.

* * *

"Oh my god."

There's something sharp on his chest, as if someone rested a pin-cushion on him, only it's soft and warm and it's making a soft quiet vibration.

"Oh my _god_ ," the voice says again, then whoever it is starts laughing as Clint opens his eyes and squints against the beams of daylight coming in through the slats of the blinds.

Lucky is still lying on the floor beside the kitten box. One of the more adventurous felines--the black and white one--has somehow climbed out of the box, up the side of the couch, and onto him. It's now asleep on Clint's chest, kneading its tiny claws against his t-shirt and purring.

Kate's standing over him, hand clamped over her mouth to stifle her laughter.

"Oh, shut up," he says, and carefully, so as not to disturb the kitten asleep on his chest, grabs a pillow and throws it at her. She dodges easily.

"You have any milk?" She opens the fridge. "Oh. You do, good." 

The box is right by the sofa, and idly, Clint reaches his arm into it. The two gray-striped kittens start climbing the sleeve of his sweatshirt. He endures their tiny claws digging through the cotton, sighs as they settle into place on his stomach, then reaches down and scoops up the little black one, which is mewing kind of pitifully, too small to climb out. The dirty black and white one wakes up and starts pouncing at a piece of fuzz floating in the fresh daylight.

From the kitchen area, Kate makes a muffled snorting noise, which Clint very purposefully ignores.

"You here for a reason or just freeloading my coffee?" Clint asks, scratching the small black kitten behind the ears. It nestles up under his chin, purring, while the others climb around as if his body is a jungle gym.

"Did you know Maria Hill has left you, like, ten voicemail messages? She finally called _me_ to come here and make sure your sorry ass was still alive. I guess it's something important. You might want to call her back."

Crap. It's never good when Maria wants to talk to him, let alone urgently. 

While Kate rummages around the kitchen fixing herself some coffee, Clint arranges the kittens on his chest, getting very comfortable before he listens to Maria's messages. All ten of them, each increasingly less polite and more annoyed.

When he's done, Clint sighs deeply. Two of the kittens purr against his chest while the other two try to bite each other's tails.

"Better suit up, Katie," he says. "And bring the trick arrows."

"Yessss! And don't call me Katie!"

* * *

It's Sunday so he's not going to be able to take the kittens to the ASPCA or The Humane Society.

"Lucky, keep an eye on them," Clint says. The dog lies down next to the box with the kittens inside.

One of them peed on his S.H.I.E.L.D. t-shirt.

"Oh, kitten."

* * *

They just ran a red light. The thing is, there's a big black SUV on their six, full of people shooting at them. Clint's hungry again, and could use a sandwich, which is inconvenient, but nothing he can do anything about right now.

With her legs braced against the passenger seat, Kate stands up through the sun-roof of the car they jacked in order to make a getaway. She fires a trick arrow. It hits the windshield of the black SUV. Clint catches a glimpse of the small explosion in the rear-view mirror before he snaps his attention back to the alarming pace of his own driving.

"Damn it," Kate yells out.

"What!"

"It didn't stop them."

He can't see what Kate's doing, and then he's distracted by the pinging of bullets grazing the side of the car. He swerves to make a more difficult target. Luckily there isn't a lot of traffic--it's a backroad on Long Island, lots of farms. Not a bad place to hide a Hydra safehouse. At least they got the data Maria needed, stored on a memory stick. It's tucked safely away in a pocket on Clint's uniform.

Beside him Kate's body jerks.

"Katie?"

"Yeah I'm okay." Her voice sounds shaky.

"Did you get shot? Are you shot??"

"No," she calls down. “It was close."

It's all he can do to keep his hands on the wheel, to not grab her by the belt and pull her down into the car. He glances up and she's nocking another arrow, her hair blowing in every direction. If he touches her now, he'll throw off her concentration. It's amazing she can even see but she fires off another precise shot. Kate’s arrow knocks a gun out of the grasp of the Hydra agent hanging out the SUV's window.

Another one of them keeps shooting.

Screw it.

Clint turns the wheel hard and drives the car into a cornfield. 

"What the hell are you doing?" Kate yells.

"Keeping us alive," he yells back.

He waits until they're far enough into the cornfield, then stops the car. Silence settles around them. The SUV won't be far behind, they have to hurry. 

"Get out of the car." He taps her leg.

She pulls herself out the sunroof and drops into the row of corn next to him in a crouch. A breeze shushes through the stalks. ”Now what?"

"We have to run."

* * *

There are all kinds of places to hide in farm country. At the edge of the cornfield, as he expects, they find a stream. They follow the stream to a drainage tunnel. 

They lie down side by side, in the wet leaves and debris and twigs that have caught there. The air smells moldly and muddy and too much like cow for his liking. 

Kate stares straight ahead out the opening, her body tense. The sound of her heart-rate is a little elevated. Clint shifts an inch or two closer. She sneezes, her shoulder against his.

It takes another twenty minutes before he hears the helicopter, and Maria texts him. _Hydra agents in custody. Where are u._

“Good thing Maria responded so fast to your text message," Kate says pointedly, crawling out of the drain tunnel. She stretches. "Maybe next time you should actually call her back instead of making her leave you twelve voice mails."

"It was ten," Clint protests, climbing out after her. 

While his uniform and Kate’s are water-resistant, his bare arms are cold from the water. Kate hugs herself, trying to keep warm. The sun is low in the sky, light thinning. 

"You did good work, Hawkeye,” he tells Kate, as the beat of the helicopter gets closer, almost swallowing his words.

She gives him a side-long look, then grins wide.

* * *

Clint stands facing the animal shelter's main door, holding the cardboard box.

"You saved them.” Kate’s elbow nudges his. "It's a no-kill shelter, they'll all get adopted, it's always easier for kittens, they'll get good homes, maybe with little kids. They'll have little kitty trees to climb on and a kitten bed and those little toys with a bell inside of it to chase and someone looking after them until they're old enough to be alone all day."

There really isn't any way he can look after them adequately--they're too small and need someone who is going to be around all the time.

"Yeah," he says, his throat thick. 

"You _saved_ them," Kate says, more firmly. 

He puts the box down and crouches, scratching each of them behind the ears. They bump their heads against his hand, purring. The tightness in his throat gets worse. The grey and black one licks his thumb.

"Aw, kittens," he says softly, then picks up the box and takes them inside.


End file.
